Lifestyle – When Portumna man Joe Dolphin was diagnosed with cancer in 2008, his daughter and best ally Katherine cared for him until he died in 2017, even as she too became very ill with the disease. She has now written a book to fundraise for cancer charities and offer hope to others, as she tells JUDY MURPHY.

“It was a real lads’ pad. Even the dogs were male,” recalls Katherine Dolphin-Griffin of the life-changing event that occurred when she was 16 years old.

She’s laughing as she tells the story, but when Katherine’s mother left home, it fell to the teenager to look after her four brothers, three of whom were younger than her.

She did so, working as a team with her father Joe, who was born and reared in Portumna.  Joe settled in Cork in 1970, working as a District Superintendent for the Department of Agriculture, after he’d graduated from Warrenstown Agricultural College in Meath.

“He was one of those wonderful, special people who radiated positivity,” says Katherine of her dad who died of cancer on February 4, 2017, aged 69.

He’d had his first diagnosis – non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma – in February 2008, with four further diagnoses before his death.

Joe was an entrepreneur who – at different times – ran an estate agents, an engineering firm and a video-production company in his adopted county. Katherine, his right-hand woman, regularly travelled in the car with him, paying wages to his employees.

They first became a team when she was just four years old. Both fell ill with jaundice and would eat custard and jelly together when they couldn’t face anything else. Much later, she realised how similar their immune systems were.

Joe worked hard and enjoyed life and always had his dancing shoes in his car, even when he was ill, says his daughter.

Katherine describes her mother as “a good person” who left home for her own reasons.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.

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